The second we make it through the door of the Chi Omega chapter house, my senses are assaulted with pounding music and the smell of body odor and spilled beer.
Ah, college parties.
I’ll admit; I’m not a big partier or drinker, seeing as I’m not twenty-one yet and I have an athletic scholarship I need to keep, but this is one of the few parties I always make sure I attend. After all, the girls at the Chi O house put this on for us as a way to kick off the season, so it’d be rude if we didn’t show up.
I don’t waste a minute once we’re inside, grabbing Pen by the sleeve of his jacket and dragging his ass to the backyard before he can disappear off to some dark corner and sulk the way he normally does.
Okay, so sulking might be the wrong term, but it’s close enough to be accurate. The last party he came to—which was almost three months ago, I might add—he barely talked to anyone. Myself included. And there’s no way I’m letting him go through all of college without having at least one good party experience.
And it’s happening tonight. Even if he’s still planning to be the DD.
“Man-handle me much?” he bitches, trying to yank his arm free from my hold.
“I’m not letting you leave this party until you admit to having fun,” I tell him as we weave our way through the back door.
The back patio is lit up with hanging lights under one of those pergola things, multiple kegs off to one side and three beer pong tables front and center. I forego the main attraction for a moment, grabbing us both a beer.
“Oh, really? I can’t leave?” His tone is skeptical at best, but when I glance over and catch him eyeing the beer pong table, I can tell the idea of having fun might be piquing his interest.
“Yep,” I say, handing him a cup of frothy liquid. “Now let’s show these fuckers how to run a damn table, yeah?”
He looks at the cup in his hands, then back at the table.
“Ah, fuck it.”
Tapping the rim of his cup to mine, we make our way over to call the next game. It takes a lot longer for us to get in, but we shoot the shit with a few of my teammates while we wait.
My phone’s been dinging with message notifications from that stupid app since we walked through the damn door, and finally, I silence it and quickly slip it back into my pocket right before we’re called for our first game.
Our opponents are two guys from the football team—they always crash our preseason party just like we crash theirs—and I’m pretty sure one is the new quarterback…which might be a bad omen for us. After all, his job on the field is to throw balls accurately.
And when I shoot, going a little long, I’m pretty positive we’re gonna have the floor wiped with us.
Aspen lets out a low laugh as he lines up his shot, and I cross my arms. “Like you’re gonna be any better.”
He arches a brow and shoots, hitting the rim of one cup before the ball bounces in the one next to it. “You were saying?” he taunts as one of the guys on the other team pulls two cups.
I gape at him. “How are you still good at this?”
He shrugs, watching the other two take their turn. “Physics.”
I scoff. Leave it to Aspen to bring math into this. Wait, science? It’s one of the two, but hell if I know which physics technically falls into. I’m a business major, and that shit’s way over my head.
“Well. Okay, then,” I say with a grin.
With Aspen’s magical secret weapon, running the table isn’t hard for us to accomplish. We’re a team that feeds off each other, picking up our game where the other is weak. His game is stronger at the beginning and can’t seem to finish—something I’m sure to give him hell for later—but that’s where I pick up the slack.
And hell if we don’t knock out team after team that comes up to call the next game.
Our fifth game wraps up—where we defeat Avery and Reese in a blow out, by the way—and I’m somewhere in that wonderful place between buzzed and drunk. The fuzzy state where life is a little bit off-kilter, and if I keep going at this pace, there’s a good chance I’ll end up sleeping on our bathroom floor tonight, since I’m downing the majority of the drinks for both of us.
There’s no way we’re giving up our spot at the table until we lose, though. Which doesn’t look like it’s happening anytime soon, since Aspen and I both sink our first shots against two Chi O sisters, earning us balls back. Then Pen makes the second shot too.
I burst into laughter and wrap my arm around his shoulders, dragging him into a clumsy hug. “You’re on fire.”
He turns his face toward me, a small smirk tilting his lips. “Dude, that was only two. On fire is three. How drunk are you?”
Pretty drunk, apparently. And with him this close, his mouth only inches from mine…the feeling of intoxication only gets worse.
“Can you two just get a fucking room?” Avery calls from the table two over. “Oh, wait. That’s right. You already have one together.”
Reese and a couple other people around chuckle and laugh at the comment, and normally, I would too. There’s no point in doing anything but that when it comes to guys like Avery. Fighting them or talking back only riles them up more.
Except I feel hot all over and so transparent, I might as well be a piece of glass.
“The amount of toxic masculinity you radiate is truly disturbing,” Pen retorts, rolling his eyes before shrugging out of my hold and looking at me. “This is getting a little too easy. I think we need to up the stakes or we’re gonna end up passed out here at the end of the night.”
Checking out the table, I see we only have three cups left to their eight.
Shit, he has a point.
“He’s right,” Tori—one of the girls we’re playing against—agrees. “And Keene, I’m sorry, but you’re a sloppy drunk. There’s no way in hell I’m taking care of you.”
I clutch my chest in mock offense. “Tori. And I thought we were friends.”
She and her partner, Kensie, both laugh as they take their turn to shoot. “Friends are honest with each other, honey. I’m sure your bestie there agrees with me.”
I turn and look at Pen, who catches the ball Tori just shot when it bounces off the table. When he realizes I’m waiting on an answer, he just smirks and mimes zipping his lips closed.
“Fucking assholes, all of you,” I mutter with a shake of my head. Which was a bad idea, because it just makes me dizzy.
“Why don’t we up the stakes by adding in that game you guys used to play?” Kensie suggests, shooting and missing her toss turn too.
“Don’t You Dare?” Pen asks, cocking his head. “How do you know about that?”
He stole the words right outta my damn mouth, but then it dawns on me, and I can’t believe I didn’t recognize her sooner when she’s been to countless parties where DYD was played, even if she didn’t go to our school.
“Oh, shit! Kensie Dalton? Who used to date Frankie Sanders?”
“Took you long enough to put it together, Waters.” She smirks, tapping her finger to her lips. “So let’s change the rules a bit. Sort of combining the two games. For every shot you make, a dare is tacked on. If you don’t do it, the cup stays on the table. Both of you pass on the same dare, then you forfeit the game.”
Seems fair enough, so we both nod in agreement and start back in on the game.
It takes a few tries for Aspen to hit another shot, for which he’s dared to strip to his underwear and play the rest of the game like that.
I’m already pretty useless in my inebriated state, and his almost-naked form shivering beside me makes it even harder to focus on shooting. To no surprise, I miss the next three rounds. Add in that the girls somehow start heating up and get balls back on a round, and we’re at two cups to four.
We’ve also garnered quite the crowd ever since the new dare rule was implemented. Mostly girls staring at Pen half naked, not that I can really blame them.
“Fuck,” he mutters when I miss again, glancing at me. “Some closer you are.”
“I’m a catcher. I catch balls.”
He snorts and shakes his head, and Landon—our team’s actual closer—chips in with, “If you wanted to call a celebrity shot, you just had to ask.”
I flip him the bird just as Aspen takes another shot toward the cups, this one spinning in one before popping into the other. Normally, that would be game over, but when the girls call for Pen to drink a cup of eight different beers and liquors mixed together, he goes pale.
Well, paler than his already pasty ass is.
“Absolutely not. I’m driving,” he says, eyeing the cup. “And even if I wasn’t, there’s no fucking way.”
It ends up being a compromise that they pull one cup, leaving us up one to four. Which quickly dwindles down to one to two after another couple rounds. These girls are making the comeback of the century—okay, of the party—and the crowd around us grows more.
Aspen misses again when Tori decides to play dirty by leaning over and pulling her top down to show more cleavage. The ball goes long, hitting her right in the chest, and both girls start laughing.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Pen says in a tone more flirtatious than normal. “I hit my target.”
It earns a wink from Tori before she leans down to do the same thing to me.
I have to say, it’s definitely distracting. Her rack’s a thing of beauty. So I don’t know how I manage to land the last shot with them staring me in the face, but I do.
It spins around the cup, and Tori tries to blow it out unsuccessfully.
The crowd cheers, the game over if the girls miss their rebuttal shots. Which, of course, they do.
And just like that, all that’s left is one final dare.
I raise my brow at them, silently asking them to do their worst. But I must be asking for a death wish when I do, since Tori smiles deviously when she leans in to Kensie and whispers something in her ear. They both take turns giggling and nodding, taking their sweet-ass time debating before they turn back to me.
I’m hit with the weirdest sense of déjà vu when Kensie smiles, the picture of innocence when she says, “Well, Waters. Don’t you dare?”
The feeling gets stronger, spiking my heart rate.
“Just get on with it, baby girl. We’ve got another game to win after this.”
That gets a laugh outta some people watching.
She bites her lip for a second, a clear sign of indecision. But then she says, “I dare you to make out with Aspen.”
Just like that, I’m hit with a bucket of cold water. In fact, I’ve gone from drunk to stone-cold sober as her words register in my brain.
Oh, fuck, no.
I know for a fact she wasn’t there the one and only other time Pen and I kissed, since it was after she and Frankie had broken up. There’s no way she’s aware of an eerily similar dare being tossed on my plate previously, or they would’ve decided on something else.
Why go with a dare we’ve already done? It wouldn’t make sense.
But here we are, and—
“Fucking done,” Pen mutters, turning to me and grabbing the back of my neck.
An aching want fills my veins at the same time panic seizes me. Because this time, it wouldn’t just be a dare. It didn’t even end up being just a dare last time, and it certainly wouldn’t be just kissing between two straight best friends.
That’s the only excuse for why I react the way I do as his mouth closes in on mine.
I hold my hands up and shove Pen. On his bare chest, because he’s still stripped down from one of the previous dares, and apparently, I do it hard enough to send him flying into the table next to ours. He hits it with full force, and when it flips on its side, cups, cans, and bottles scatter, crashing to the ground with him.
Gasps echo out into the night, but then the entire party goes dead silent. The music pounding from inside the house fades into nothing as ringing starts in my ears. It’s possible time even comes to a standstill as I stare down at Pen on the ground. Practically naked. Dripping wet with water and alcohol.
Seething mad.
“What the fuck, Keene?” he hisses, wrenching his body up from the ground and shaking his limbs out. A couple girls gripe when they get misted, while some start murmuring and snickering at the scene I’ve just caused.
Of course, public humiliation wouldn’t be complete without Avery being the first person to make a jackass comment.
“Aw, would you look at that? Kohl just got rejected by his boyfriend in front of everyone.”
Fortunately, the comment only earns a few awkward laughs as Pen grabs his clothes from the ground beside the table.
Unfortunately, Pen looks more than just rejected, which is clearly written in his eyes. He also looks ready to commit murder. And though I’m usually the one who’d help bury the body…I’m pretty sure I’m the body this time.
I blink back at him, my thoughts a jumbled mess and emotions running haywire.
Why did I do that? Why did I fucking do that?
I don’t have the chance to open my mouth, let alone say something, before Aspen grips my arm like a vice and drags me out the back gate and into the alley.
“Pen, I—”
“Shut the fuck up, Keene,” he snaps.
I shut up. Zip my mouth closed, as hard as it is for me, and let him steer me away from the party to where the Impala is parked down the street.
